Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig De Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, video games are an
integral part of global media culture, rivaling Hollywood in revenue and
influence. No longer confined to a subculture of adolescent males,
video games today are played by adults around the world. At the same
time, video games have become major sites of corporate exploitation and
military recruitment.In Games of Empire, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig
de Peuter offer a radical political critique of such video games and
virtual environments as Second Life, World of Warcraft, and Grand Theft
Auto, analyzing them as the exemplary media of Empire, the
twenty-first-century hypercapitalist complex theorized by Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri. The authors trace the ascent of virtual gaming,
assess its impact on creators and players alike, and delineate the
relationships between games and reality, body and avatar, screen and
street.Games of Empire forcefully connects video games to real-world
concerns about globalization, militarism, and exploitation, from the
horrors of African mines and Indian e-waste sites that underlie the
entire industry, the role of labor in commercial game development, and
the synergy between military simulation software and the battlefields of
Iraq and Afghanistan exemplified by Full Spectrum Warrior to the
substantial virtual economies surrounding World of Warcraft, the urban
neoliberalism made playable in Grand Theft Auto, and the emergence of an
alternative game culture through activist games and open-source game
development.Rejecting both moral panic and glib enthusiasm, Games of
Empire demonstrates how virtual games crystallize the cultural,
political, and economic forces of global capital, while also providing a
means of resisting them.